Favstar Destroyer: Twitter API hostility claims another service

Come June 19, 2018, or thereabouts, Twitter will be stopping its streaming API. That's the application programming interface developers of third-party Twitter apps, including twitter clients and web services, used to refresh timelines and send push notifications. Twitter will be providing a new Account Activity API to replace it, but not much is known about it and time is running out for developers to be granted access so they can implement it quickly enough to avoid interruptions in service. That uncertainty is what's leading Favstar, the popular service for seeing which of your tweets were the most favorited and discovering other highly favorited tweets, to shut down.

During December 2017 Twitter stated that on June 19th 2018 they will be shutting down the method that Favstar and other third-party Twitter apps use to receive your Tweets, Likes, and Retweets. You can read more about this on Apps of a Feather.

Twitter wrote that they'll be replacing this with another method of data access, but have not been forthcoming with the details or pricing. Favstar can't continue to operate in this environment of uncertainty.

Just like it's never safe to scurry beneath the feet of uncaring (or just plain clumsy) giants, it's never safe to build your service on Twitter (or Facebook or Google, for that matter). If it's a valuable service, there's always the chance the tech giant will want to own it for themselves. In the best case, they buy you out for some serious cash. In the worst case, they simply copy your value and make it native.

If it's not a valuable service, even if it's a beloved one, the tech giant might just end your access to its users, social graph, or other data. And then you're done.

You can say the tech giants are well within their rights to do what they want with their services. And fair enough. But many of these relationships are symbiotic and the third-parties provide experiences that, in turn, elevates the tech giant.

Twitter, infamously, achieved a lot of early success, in part, thanks to the work of third-party developers. Then it got big, decided to focus less on tech and more on the mainstream, advertising, and entertainment, and began starving out third-parties. These days, Twitter simply seems like it has no idea what it is or what it wants to do.